Re: [PATCH 00/23] kbuild: significantly speed up kernel builds

From: Florian Fainelli

Date: Wed Sep 09 2026 - 18:08:49 EST


On 9/8/26 13:55, Lorenzo Stoakes (ARM) wrote:
A typical kernel build consists of a frustratingly large amount of time
spent stuck in single-threaded bottlenecks.

It turns out that there's a lot we can do about this and doing so
significantly impacts kernel build times.

This series makes allmodconfig builds up to 36% faster, incremental builds
up to ~70% faster, and noop builds up to ~90% faster.

Builds are faster across the board on every device I tested.

Machines used for perf testing:

* Threadripper - x86, AMD Threadripper 9980X, 64 cores, 128 threads
* EPYC - x86, 2 socket EPYC 9754, 256 cores, 512 threads
* M2 - arm64, 2022 M2 macbook pro, 8 cores, 8 threads
(4 perf, 4 efficiency)

My AMD EPYC 9454P server shows an improvement in the order of 13% using the arm64's defconfig and make -j97. Thanks for doing this!
--
Florian